Can't cat tape- big blocks?

[Conor P. Cahill]

martin at adpplz.UUCP (Martin Golding) writes:

>We got a 9 track tape in tar format, with 10k blocks. It's from a BSD type 
>system (at least, the tar headers match my sun manuals and tar from
>...
>When we cat it to a file (cat /dev/r50t >/dir/bigfile), it looks
>like we don't get all the data from the tape. We get the same effect
>if we rsh cat <the device>.

The problem is the blocking factor.  You must read data from a 9-track
drive in blocks that are at least as big as the block that was used to
write the tape.  So to get the data off your tape use:

	dd if=/dev/r50t of=whereever bs=10k

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Conor P. Cahill            (703)430-9247        Virtual Technologies, Inc.
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